Babylon and Anglo Saxon England

“Taken as a whole, as a web of narratives and images, Babylon incorporates a number of subsidiary allusions—

1. places: the Tower of Babel, the plain of Shiner, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers; peoples (often blurred together indiscriminately): the Chaldeans, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Mesopotamians; 
2. characters: Nimrod, Ninus, Semiramis, Nebuchadnezzar, the Whore of Babylon; 
3. events: the founding of empires, waves of strife (including the Assyrian, Persian, and Macedonian conquests of the region), the Babylonian captivity of the Jews, and so forth.” (37-38).

“The equation of Babylon with the Tower of Babel was a commonplace” (38).

“In Augustinian thought Babylon represents the City of Man, standing in opposition to Jerusalem, the City of God” (39).

“Thus Babylon serves to represent life on earth, homo viator wandering in the exile of the fallen world, awaiting eventual return to the Celestial City” (39).

“Babylon is a traditional, well-known metaphor for exile” (39).

“four main components to the understanding of Babylon” (40).

1. “unmatched power and magnitude of the city and empire” (40) & “power of Babylon bound up with a cyclical sense of her eventual fall” (42).
2. “deadly exoticism and evil of the city, inhabitants, and environs” (42).
3. “center of exotic Eastern sensuality” (43).
4. “an acknowledgment of Chaldean learning and cultural achievement” (43). “Anglo-Saxon reverence for mighty urban works” (41). “In the Western tradition the great power of Babylon seemingly cannot be described without reference to the irony that all things, even the mightiest, pass away” (42).

“Thus we have a Western fiction based upon a historical reality that in turn becomes part of Christian discourse and serves a multifaceted rhetorical function: the East, in its power and corruption, is the embodiment of alterity” (44).

“all Western endeavours are seemingly belated when compared to Babylon” (44).

“Babylon—in all its power and terror—is always already fallen or diminished even as it is introduced” (44).

“It is the past as enemy; the past as dark father; the past as Apocalypse, if you will, rather than the future” (44).

“caught in a moment of slow time” (45).

“Babylon simultaneously decays beneath the sands even as it exults in its strength” (45).

“Babylon can serve not just as a geographical marker but also in a wider sense as prior backdrop, counterpoint, reference marker of the imaginative horizon” (45).

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“Saturn is a strange composite figure, bearing aspects of the Titan enemy of Jupiter, the Babylonian god Bel, and Nimrod” (48).

“archetypal pagan” (48).

“Saturn is a sort of emissary from the depths of long ago; from a time and place of sublime power and terror” (49).

“Babylon, the eldest, darkest, and greatest of empires, always lost to history, has a special place in Christian pre-history” (53).

“‘Babylon’” denotes a specific body of allusive thought active in Anglo-Saxon England . . . [and] can also serve to label a way of knowing, a mode of apprehending the past that incorporates the dynamics of background and foreground, priority and belatedness, absence and presence” (53).

“‘the Babylon complex’” (54): “by the overarching shadow of a grim past, a belated, compelling chapter in human pre-history that is always already only a rumour and a myth, waits in dark lucidity, helping to give potential shape and form” (54).

“the ‘Babylon complex’ generates a power, a depth of emotion, through the dialectic of presence and absence: ‘absence’ in that Babylon is always belated, always lost, always gone—a very emblem of faded glories, both proud and terrible, of human history; ‘presence’ in that, thought lost, Babylon always remains on the horizon of the possible and the immanent, as a moral exemplum (a Babylon within), a figure for the Augustinian City of Man, an element in the cyclical understanding of human history and political empires, and—perhaps most simply and powerfully—as anxious memory’ (54).